Looked at through a pessimistic lens — the one so relentlessly applied by the producers of political commercials — voters face a dreary choice Tuesday.

Should they cast their ballots for President Obama, who has racked up record debt, gotten the economy moving at only a limping pace, and generally failed to bring Washington to the kumbaya moment that he promised in 2008?

Or should they spurn the incumbent in favor of the Republican nominee, who has changed positions so many times that his core beliefs are hard to discern? Is Mitt Romney the pragmatic moderate of the recent presidential debates, or the conservative hard-liner of the primaries?

There's no denying the negatives in either case. The records are clear.

But dwelling on them is mostly a distraction. It obscures the bigger question voters face Tuesday, which is not just about the individuals but also about which direction the country should move.

Not since the post-Civil War era has the nation been so politically divided for so long. If the polls are right, this will be the third election of the last four with a winning margin of fewer than 4 percentage points — doubling the total for the past 100 years. It could also be the second time since 2000, and just the third since 1888, that a candidate has won the popular vote and lost the national election.

The trend in Congress is the same. Majorities have been consistently smaller over the past two decades than at any time since women were given the right to vote. And, as everyone knows, the parties are increasingly polarized.

Small wonder, then, the country has worked itself into such a mess — deep in debt, divided on a host of social issues, and deadlocked on the current version of the USA's centuries-long argument about the role of the federal government.

Unless the polls are wildly off, the fight won't be settled Tuesday. But one side or the other will get an upper hand at a pivotal moment, with weighty consequences.

ObamaCare will live or die with the result. Romney says he'd gut it by executive order; Obama's re-election would preserve it until 2014, when many of its provisions take force.

Roe v. Wade may live or die, as well. One more conservative vote on the Supreme Court would likely spell its demise. On other hand, should a conservative be replaced by a liberal, the court's 5-4 majorities on a host of issues could tip the other way.

In foreign affairs, Romney has steadily narrowed his differences with Obama, but in the spring he struck a more bellicose stance. The outcome could decide whether to launch a war with Iran and how to end the one in Afghanistan, as well as the fate of relations with the Middle East and China.

The list goes on.

Unlike other publications, we do not presume to tell our readers which choice is right for them. We've expressed opinions on all those issues. But telling readers how to balance them is another matter. The family of a soldier in Afghanistan is likely to have different priorities from a worker struggling to find a job or a young woman trying to cope with an unwanted pregnancy. There isn't one universal right choice, even for members of our ideologically diverse Editorial Board. Nor do we care to be aligned with either party. We routinely criticize both and try to point a path to consensus, because if Congress does not find one soon, few American lives will be unharmed.

All by itself, failure to reach a compromise that would avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, not just two months away, would plunge the nation back into recession. With power so closely divided, chances that either side will get to dictate the solution are zero.

So our advice to voters is this: Stay true to your convictions, whether or not they happen to match ours, but vote for the candidates who you believe will respect the voters' choice and govern, not just shout from the ideological ramparts in the false belief that they can win all at once.

This extraordinary period of national division will end one day. The challenge is to elect candidates who can steer the nation there without creating the sort of cataclysm that has sometimes ended such divisions in the past.